Chapter 7 #2
She had a hunter's memory for detail, sharpened by four months of having nothing to do but watch, and she laid it out clean, and Francis and Ruth listened and did not interrupt, and Nathan was called in halfway through, and Cole,
and by the end there were five of them around the table and a scratched map on it, and the shape of Stanley Macklemore's kingdom was appearing on it line by line.
"They come from the east," Nell said. "Always the east. There's a road, an old state highway, runs east off the plain toward the mountains, and that's where they base out of. I never got close, but every truck I ever saw came from the east and went back east. That's where the warehouse is,
or whatever they use for a warehouse. That's home base for them."
"How far," Francis asked.
"Far. Half a day's drive for them, I'd guess, from the way they'd show up midmorning and be gone by dark. So a day and a half, two days walking. It's not close. Which matters, right? Because every farm they hit, they've got to drive all the way out from the east and all the way back.
That's a lot of driving. That's a lot of."
She looked at Francis. "That's a lot of fuel, isn't it. That's the thing you're thinking about. The fuel."
Francis looked at her sharply. "How'd you know that."
"Because I watched them run out once," Nell said.
The room went dead quiet.
"Middle of winter," Nell said. "A cold snap, real bad. And there was a truck, one of theirs, out on the plain, and it just. Stopped. Died right out in the open. I watched it from the ridge for two days. The men were stuck. They had to leave it and walk, and it was cold, and they were miserable,
I could tell even from a mile off, they were stamping and swearing and finally they just left the truck and walked east."
She leaned in. "And here's the thing. Nobody came for that truck for a week. A whole week. A working truck, the most valuable thing in the world now, sitting dead in the open, and they didn't come get it for a week. And when they finally did, they came with cans. Fuel cans.
They didn't fix it out there. They put fuel in it and drove it home."
Her eyes were bright. "Because it hadn't broken. It had run dry. It ran out of gas. And it took them a week to get around to bringing more, because."
"Because fuel's precious," Francis breathed.
"Because they ration it. Because even the Combine, even the kings of the plain, are watching their fuel drain and can't get more, and they don't burn a drop they don't have to."
He looked at Ruth, and Ruth looked back, and the same understanding passed between them.
"It's worse for them than we even thought. They're not fat on fuel. They're rationing it. They're scared of it running out. That truck sat a week because they had to decide whether it was worth the gas to go save the gas."
"That's what it looked like from up high," Nell said.
"They're not rich. Not the way you'd think, seeing the trucks. They're poor in the one thing that matters and they're spending it down every day just to stay scary. The trucks are."
She searched for it. "They're like a fire that's using up all the wood there is. Looks big and hot and like it'll burn forever. But there's no more wood coming. And they know it. That's why they built the whole thing around the harvest, isn't it.
They're trying to lock in the farms while the trucks still run, so that when the trucks finally die, they've already got everybody trained to be scared, already got the whole plain owned, so it doesn't matter anymore that they can't drive."
Francis stared at the fifteen-year-old girl across his table.
"That's exactly it," he said quietly. "That's exactly what they're doing. You watched a whole warlord's strategy off a ridge with a rabbit gun and worked out the thing at the bottom of it. Nell. My God."
Nell almost smiled. The first one Francis had seen from her. It was small and rusty, a thing not used in a long time.
"I had a lot of time to think," she said.
"Nothing else to do up there. Just watch and think."
The small smile faded. "And plan. I used to lie up there and plan how I'd hurt them. If I ever got the chance. If I ever wasn't alone anymore."
She looked around the crowded table, at the faces, at the fire, at the safe warm room she'd watched all winter and finally come down into.
"I didn't think I'd ever get the chance. I figured I'd just watch them win forever and die alone up there eventually."
Her jaw set. "But you're really gonna fight them. So maybe I do get the chance. So ask me anything. Anything you want. I'll tell you every single thing I saw. Because I want to help you take the fat man's fire and put it out."
And Francis Deckham looked at this girl, this broken, brilliant, grieving girl who had turned a winter of loneliness into a map of the enemy's one weakness, and he felt the plan in his head shift from a hope into something that might, might, actually be real.
Because he had the thread now. The fuel. And he had Ruth, who could grow the bait. And Nathan and Cole, who could fight. And now he had Nell, who could see. Eyes on the whole plain. A season of reconnaissance already done. The exact intelligence he'd have died trying to gather himself.
The braid was thickening. And it was becoming, strand by strand, not just a family.
It was becoming an army. A small one. A ragged, unlikely, nineteen-soul army of the old and the young and the grieving and the grey.
But an army.
And then Nathan, who had been quiet, studying the map, spoke up, and his voice had an edge Francis didn't like.
"This is all good," Nathan said slowly. "This is better than good. But there's a hole in it, Francis, and it's a big one, and I've been sitting here not wanting to say it."
He looked up. "Nineteen of us. That's what we've got. And you keep saying army, and I understand why, but nineteen people, half of them can't fight, is not enough. Not for this. Not against three trucks and fifteen guns and however many more he's got back east that we've never even seen.
You said it yourself, the first night. There is no version of this where sixteen of us beat Stanley Macklemore. Well, nineteen isn't sixteen, but it isn't enough either, and adding one girl with a rabbit gun and a good memory doesn't change the math enough to matter."
The room quieted. Because it was true, and everyone knew it was true.
"So what are you saying," Francis said.
"I'm saying you've been building toward this the whole time, and I want to hear you say it out loud," Nathan said.
"You keep talking about every soul on this plain. Every ally we can find. You said it about Nell before we even knew she was a scared kid. You've got the fuel plan and you've got the bait and you've got the eyes. But you don't have the numbers. And there's only one place to get them."
He held Francis's gaze. "The other farms. The other people Macklemore's got under his boot. All the ones like Ruth's place, like Nell's family. All the frightened farms out there complying and hating it and grieving their dead and thinking they're alone. You want an army big enough to beat him,
you've got to go find them, and you've got to convince them to rise up with you, and you've got to do it without Macklemore finding out first."
He let that sit.
"And that," Nathan said grimly, "means somebody has to leave this farm. Somebody has to go out there, onto Combine ground, farm to farm, in secret, and raise a rebellion. Right under the fat man's nose. And if they get caught doing it."
He didn't finish. He didn't have to. Nell's flat voice had already told them all what the Combine did to examples.
Francis looked around the table, at all their faces turned to him, and he knew, with a cold certainty, exactly who was going to have to go out onto that killing ground and raise the army.
He knew, because he was the grey man. He was the one who could move unseen.
He was the one who could walk onto a strange farm and read it in ten seconds and talk his way into trust or out of trouble.
He was the one built for exactly this, for moving invisible through hostile country and doing the impossible quiet thing.
And he was the one with a son asleep in the next room, who could not lose another parent.
The talk broke up near midnight.
There was too much to decide and not enough decided, and Francis could feel the weight of it pressing on all of them, the thing Nathan had named and left hanging in the air. Somebody would have to go out onto Combine ground. Somebody would have to raise the army.
Everyone knew who. No one said it.
They drifted off to their beds and their watches, one by one, and the fire burned down to a low red glow, and Francis sat a while longer at the table with the scratched map, turning it over, until it was just him and Ruth left in the dim kitchen.
The old woman was watching him.
"You've got the look," she said.
"What look."
"The one that means you're chewing on some small thing while a big thing sits right in front of you," Ruth said. "I've seen it on you a few times now. It's how you keep from drowning in the big thing. You pick up a little one and worry it like a dog with a bone."
Francis almost smiled. She read him too well.
"The Glock," he said.
Ruth raised an eyebrow.
"Out in the yard," Francis said. "When Macklemore was here. You told him you had a Glock inside the house. And he snapped his fingers and put ten shotguns on you for it."
He looked at her steady. "I've been turning it over ever since. Because if that was a bluff, it was the bravest bluff I ever saw a person make. And if it wasn't a bluff."
"Then there's a gun in your house you never knew about," Ruth said.
"Then there's a gun in my house I never knew about," Francis agreed. "Near my son. And I'd have liked to have seen it."
He kept his voice even. No accusation in it. He'd learned that from Earl, and from a hard winter of leading. You did not corner a person you needed. You gave them room to do the right thing on their own.